Atticus Finch

Fictional Character / Lawyer

Born: 1960

Birthplace: Fiction

Best known as: The upstanding lawyer from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird

Atticus Finch is the exemplary lawyer and father from the 1960 Harper Lee novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Thanks to the successful film version of the book (1962), the character is strongly associated with actor Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar as Finch and earned a place in American cinema as an all-time favorite hero. Set in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s, the novel is the story of the young girl Scout, her brother Jem and their widowed father, Atticus, a small-town attorney respected for his honesty and intelligence. Part of the novel centers around a court case in which Atticus defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. Along the way Atticus helps downtrodden neighbors, fends off a lynch mob, saves the day with surprisingly expert marksmanship and preaches justice with a quiet but forceful integrity. Atticus Finch is a lock on anyone's list of favorite fictional lawyers (and probably favorite dads); in 1997 the Alabama State Bar erected a monument in his honor in Monroeville, Alabama, the home of novelist Lee.

Extra credit: Harper Lee has said Atticus Finch was based on her father, Amasa Coleman Lee.